Twitter Mass Unfollow Experiment: Day 1

My Twitter account has become pretty much worthless. So I decided to do a Twitter mass unfollow or as I like to call it, “Twitter Follow Bankruptcy.” I used to have the practice of following anyone who followed me and it quickly grew to nearly 10,000 followers. But as a result, ended up with a Twitter feed filled with posts, retweets and random thoughts from a thousand different opinions. “This must be what schizophrenia feels like,” I thought.

So after some “extensive research” (okay, I googled and clicked on two links), I found a Chrome extension called “Twitter Unfollow All” and it did just what it said it would. If you are trying to unfollow 9500 followers, like I am, you may have to let it run for a bit. It took hours to unfollow everyone.

Here are some concerns I have about this experiment.

How many followers will I lose?

This isn’t really much of a concern. Anyone who is only following me because I follow them is probably not providing much content anyway. If they are, I’ll find them again, they’ll probably follow me again and we’ll be back where we were. My estimate is I’ll lose about two or three thousand followers. Again, don’t freak out about that. These are not people who really want to hear from me anyway.

How will Twitter react?

This is a more important question. Some of the things I read said to not follow or unfollow too many in one day. The numbers ranged from 1 to 5 thousand. I’m a little impatient so I decided to see what happens and unfollow all 9500.

And that’s where we are now. I’ll update you in a day or as events happen.

Let’s discuss this

If you have a thought or question, please post it here and I’ll get back to you. I’m not sure this is a good thing to do at all. But I love experimenting. Have you done anything like this? How did it go? Let us know in the comments.

Update Day 1: 2:00pm

It took a few attempts and restarting the add-on to get it to zero. And then when I tried to add someone back, my account was frozen from adding anyone back immediately. No clue how long the ban will be. I assume a day.

I can post to the feed (that’s great news).

In the time it took me to start the process and its completion I saw a drop of nearly 20 followers.

Update Day 1: 4:00 pm

I was able to refollow accounts again. I’ll be doing this very slowly and deliberately.